Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5556295" data-attributes="member: 15538">A disclosure: I have some skin in the game.For years, I have participated in a boffer combat LARP (that is, using foam-padded swords). There is a large participation gap between men and women. And when women do compete, they do not always do well. A friend of mine wrote an essay once on how women have been taugh their whole lives that they do not have, and should not exert, power, and that to strike at someone runs counter to a lifetime of social conditioning. So many "girl fighters" are hesitent, and lack power. But I have observed time and again that if you can spend some time with those fighters, to teach them to strike without hesitation, to have confidence in their bodies, and to focus on movement more than winning, they become better. Sometimes you can see the difference in weeks, ... other times in hours! The next thing you know, the "girl fighter" is a woman fighting on-level with men, many of whom are larger. Despite their large undererepresentation in the group as a whole, they are overrepresented at the higher levels of ability. My point is that these women underperform because they have been told their whole lives that they cannot perform. And that is simply a lie. And so while it is true that men are larger and stronger, to emphasize that fact, in a culture in which men and women receive daily reminders of that, a lie flies under the flag of factuality. Real people in their real lives will be affected by some random dude on the Internet reminding women, "By the way, in case you had forgotten, your entire culture considers you frail and weak, and I will choose some unfair measures to prove this to you."Psychologically, whether intended or not, the repeated reminder of men's greater size and power serves as a reminder of men's superiority; every time a man reminds a woman that she must be protected, or tells her she can't beat a man, she is being subtly threatened by male violence in the abstract. I don't think it's justifiable harming the souls of women because physically, culturally, historically, men can long-jump a greater distance than a woman. I think it is a good and wonderful thing for a human being to do to remind people that an untrained, average woman fended off a mountain lion for hour hours with her bare hands, dying in order to protect her children. If what D&D calls Strength is anything, it's that.</blockquote>

Verification